Sorry for the slow reply, Joe. It took time for me to plow through the new posts and topics and find this thread again.
.... So what is the issue with the federal lands? That they could lock the locals out of those lands?
Hardly. There is much more to the issue then that. Did you ever stop to consider that the feds can block access from one area of private land to another by shutting down roads that travel through federal lands? Did you know that this has happened in Western states and caused an uproar among locals when it has happened? Did you know that such actions by the feds can ruin the livelihoods of ranchers and farmers and destroy property values? And the problems run much deeper and wider than that.
FreedomRoad wrote: It is the amount of land left in private ownership which is the most important criteria!
Wrong again. For the purposes of the FSP, SMALLER STATE SIZE IS BETTER, not larger. A larger state is more unwieldy and difficult to traverse and manage by a movement like the FSP. And socialistic nationalization of land is bad in and of itself—do you not agree?
• Is government ownership and nationalization of land in general a bad thing or not?
• Does the release of wolves, grizzly bears and other predators on federal lands by the feds negatively affect ranchers, farmers and residents on adjacent properties or not?
• Is it a problem or not when the federal government forces a right of way across private lands in order to get to their federal lands (a problem that residents of Wyoming, such as John Blatt and Bob Harrower of Pinedale, are currently complaining about)?
• Is it a problem or not when the general public trespasses across private owners’ land to access public land, and recreate on the private land, trash it, cause fires, cause ruts by driving across it in 4WD vehicles and snowmobiles, poach animals, etc., as been increasingly happening in WY as the population grows? Is not Tara Miller, of Big Piney, WY, right when she says, “With the increasing population here and explosion in Utah only 3-1/2 hours away, the people problem will most likely worsen.†Is it not a fact that recreational-use federal lands attract people by the tens of thousands to come tramping across adjacent private lands and bring their trash, traffic and all the problems assorted with large population flows of nonresidents?
• Will not working to privatize federal and state lands be part of any Free State Project, and thus will not more lands in government hands mean more work over a longer period of time to create something more closely resembling the Free State conceived of in the Free State Project?
• If federal lands are not a significant problem why do the Wyoming Republican and Libertarian parties include reclaiming federal lands as a plank in their platforms?
• Does not more federal lands in a state create more dependency in that state on the feds to manage those lands and to tell them whether they can have grazing rights or not?
• Are you aware that the federal government is the biggest polluter in the nation and that it does some of that polluting on federal lands?
Perhaps you’ll find the arguments of prominent libertarians on the federal lands issue more persuasive than the complaints of rank-and-file Wyoming residents and my own input:
Why did Steve Richardson, in his campaign as a Libertarian in 1998 for U.S. House-WY, call for privatization of federal lands by direct transfer to U.S. citizens if federal lands are not that big a deal?
"It's time we [Wyoming residents] started behaving like a sovereign state. Until we do, our fellow Americans will continue to treat us as
the dependent colony we've become." --Steve Richardson,
http://www.wyolp.org/releases.98.1.htmlCATO Analysis:
How and Why to Privatize Federal Landsby Terry Anderson, Vernon Smith and Emily Simmons
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-363es.htmlExecutive Summary
Fully a third of the land area of the United States is owned by the federal government. Although many Americans support the preservation of those lands, analysts on the left and the right agree that the federal government has done an exceedingly poor job of stewarding those resources. Indeed, the failure of socialism is as evident in the realm of resource economics as it is in other areas of the economy.
Four criteria should guide reform efforts: land should be allocated to the highest-valued use; transaction costs should be kept to a minimum; there must be broad participation in the divestiture process; and "squatters' rights" should be protected. Unfortunately, the land reform proposals on the table today fail to meet some or all of those criteria.
Accordingly, we offer a blueprint for auctioning off all public lands over 20 to 40 years. Both environmental quality and economic efficiency would be enhanced by private rather than public ownership. Land would be auctioned not for dollars but for public land share certificates (analogous to no par value stock certificates) distributed equally to all Americans. Those certificates could be freely transferred at any time during the divestiture period and would not expire until after the final auction. Land would be partitioned into tracts or primary units, and corresponding to each tract would be a set of distinct, separable, elemental deed rights. Any individual with a documented claim to rights defined by those deeds, however, would be assigned the appropriate deed or deeds. Once divested, tract deed rights would be freely transferable.
Why Federal Lands Hurt the Free StateFederal Lands = Nanny Statism = Federal Imperialism
To summarize what I have covered here, federal lands…
• Hurt environmental quality (the federal government is a poor steward and the largest polluter in the nation)
• Hurt economic efficiency, including resource-use efficiency and highest-valued use efficiency, and wealth creation with waste, mismanagement and opportunity costs
• Increase costs to tax payers and reduce the current and potential tax and fee base
• Increase the likelihood of wolves, grizzly bears and other predators being released on federal lands with little or no supervision or responsibility for consequences, negatively affecting ranchers, farmers and residents on nearby properties
• Increase the likelihood of the federal government forcing a right of way across private lands in order to get to their federal lands
• Increase the likelihood of the general public trespassing across private owners’ land to access public land, creating damage in so doing
• Mean more work for any Free State Project, diverting time and resources from other efforts
• Create more dependency on the nanny state to manage those lands and to tell citizens whether they can have grazing, recreational, right-of-way, etc. rights or not, and by creating more public employees and special interest groups with vested interests in profiting from and expanding further the federal lands
There are only two reasons I can think of for weighting federal lands as a positive, and perhaps they are what the creators were thinking of when they weighted that factor positively in the spreadsheet. One is that the lands could be sold off to generate some cash for a future libertarian government. The second was mentioned as a possibility by Keith Murphy at Examining Government Land Ownership on August 07, 2003, 02:04:24 pm: that federal lands cause such problems for residents of the states that have them that it helps push them toward antagonism toward the federal government.
Regarding the first possible reason, federal lands is a very difficult issue that will divert attention, time, resources and people away from tackling other issues. In order to tackle the federal government on the federal lands problem we are going to need a majority in both houses of the congress. That is a far-off goal that will first require our building power in numerous states.
As regards the second possible reason, if the spreadsheet were consistent it would need to weight other negative factors as positives using the same reverse-logic. Favoring a state because it has things that piss libertarians off doesn’t seem like a wise course.
At the very least one must agree that applying a POSTIVE Weighting to federal lands on the FSP spreadsheet leads to a perverse result. By the logic of this weighting, a state with 100% federally owned lands would achieve the BEST score!
